Monday, February 5, 2018

Family Visit: Paris - Versailles

Paris has so many sites to see it can be really hard to choose, especially when you only have a few days. Visiting Versailles takes the better part of a day, but is so worth the investment. It's an amazing palace.

This is the chapel of the palace. King Louis didn't spare any expense on this place!

I'm not sure if you can tell from the photo, but this is a series of rooms pretty much identical, but in different colors. They all hold various art objects now, but were receiving rooms and parlors at the time. The wallpaper alone is impressive.

And the famous hall of mirrors. It's so hard to get a photo because the place was mobbed with people. We had buy ahead tickets and still waiting in line outside for over an hour - and we arrived relatively early. Luckily, it was a lovely sunny day and the people watching kept us entertained.

Just a random, boring staircase.

But the real beauty of Versailles is the gardens and their fountains. A huge expanse with trees, grassy areas, walkways and lots of fountains. Just think of the engineering required at that time to pull all this off.

2017 was unfortunately a dry summer for Paris so they were rationing water, which meant only a few fountains were running and only for a very short period of time. We missed a few, but captured my favorite in the photo below.

This is one of the main and probably most well known of the fountains. Just amazing!